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08On the Ends of Sleep: Shadows in the Glare of a �4/7 WorldJonathan Crary

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On the Ends of Sleep: Shadows in the Glare of a �4/7 WorldJonathan CraryI’m going to begin my talk with three current items:

1If you’ve ever lived anywhere along the west coast of North America, you might know that

each year hundreds of species of birds migrate seasonally up and down for various dis-

tances along that continental shelf. One particular species of bird in this group are the

white-crowned sparrows, whose particular route takes them in the fall from Alaska all

the way to northern Mexico, and then back again every spring. Unlike most other birds,

this type of sparrow has a highly unusual capacity for staying awake for as long as seven

days during their migrations, which enables them to fly and navigate by night and forage

for nourishment by day without rest. It might, then, seem curious that the United States

Defense Department has been spending large amounts of money over the past five years

to study these creatures. University researchers with military funding at various universi-

ties, especially in Madison, Wisconsin, have been investigating the brain activity of the

birds during these long sleepless periods, in the hope of acquiring knowledge applicable

to human beings: that is, the aim is to discover ways to enable people to go without sleep

yet function productively and efficiently. The initial goal here, quite simply, is the creation

of the sleepless soldier, and the white-crowned sparrow study project is only a small part

of a much broader military effort to achieve at least limited mastery over human sleep.

Initiated by the advanced research division of the Pentagon (DARPA), which is credited

with the beginnings of the Internet and the Stealth fighter bomber, scientists in various

labs are conducting experimental trials of sleeplessness techniques, using neurochemi-

cals, gene therapy and even transcranial magnetic stimulation. The short-term objec-

tive is the production of a combatant who can go for a minimum of seven days without

sleep; in the longer term perhaps at least double that time. They also aim to achieve

a state of sleeplessness without the cognitive or psychic deficits associated with the use

of amphetamines in most �0th-century wars. For the last twenty years, with early results

that have been chillingly evident, the strategic logic of future military planning has been

to extract the living individual from most parts of the command, control and execution

circuit. However, the need for large numbers of human agents is not going to be elimi-

nated in the foreseeable future, and what we are seeing here is a recognition that it will

be necessary to design soldiers whose physical capabilities will more closely approximate

to the temporalities of non-human machines and networks. Ironically, the white-crowned

sparrows have been plucked from the seasonal rhythms of a biosphere to facilitate the

imposition of a machinistic or robotic model of time, efficiency, and functionality onto the

human body. However, as many studies have shown, most war-related innovations are

inevitably assimilated into a broader social sphere, and the sleepless soldier would be the

forerunner of the sleepless worker or consumer. Non-sleep, when aggressively promoted

by pharmaceutical companies, would become first a lifestyle option, and eventually for

many a necessity. The worldwide infrastructure for �4-hour non-stop work and consump-

tion has been in place for at least a decade and a half: the missing ingredient is a human

subject shaped to coincide with it more intensively.

�In the late 1990s a Russian/European space consortium announced plans to build and launch

into orbit satellites which would reflect sunlight back onto earth. The scheme, which is still

in the experimental phase, calls for a chain of nearly a hundred satellites to be placed in

� �

sun-synchronized orbits at an altitude of 1.700km, each one equipped with fold-out para-

bolic reflectors of paper-thin material �00 meters in diameter. Once fully extended, each

mirror satellite would have the capacity to illuminate a fifteen-square-kilometer area on

earth with a brightness nearly a hundred times greater than moonlight. The initial motiva-

tion was to develop a means of providing illumination for industrial and natural resource

exploitation in geographical areas with long Polar nights, in Siberia and western Russia.

But since then, the company has extended the notion to providing night-time lighting for

entire cities and metropolitan areas, on the grounds that it would reduce the immense

energy costs of electric lighting. The company’s slogan pitches its product (or services)

as ‘daylight all night long.’ I was unable to discover what their revenue-generating model

was. Vocal opposition to the project sprang up immediately.

International astronomical organizations expressed dismay because of the consequences for

most earth-based space observation. Other scientific and environmental groups declared

that it would have detrimental physiological consequences for both animal and human

behavior, in that the absence of regular alternations between night and day would disrupt

various metabolic patterns, including sleep, which regulate biological activity. Lastly, there

were protests and petitions from a range of cultural and humanitarian groups, which as-

sembled arguments around the proposition that the night sky is a common possession,

to which all of humanity is entitled to have fundamental access – or to put it another way,

the ability to experience the darkness of night and observe the stars is a basic human

right that no corporation can nullify. (Though if this is some category of right or privilege,

it is already being violated for over half of the world’s population, in cities or mega-cities

that are enveloped continuously in a penumbra of smog and high-intensity illumination.)

Some defenders of the project, however, included some self-labeled ‘environmentalists’

who asserted dubiously that such technology would help lower nocturnal use of electric-

ity, and that governments should support a trade-off of the night sky and its darkness for

reduced global energy consumption. In any case, I point to this enterprise, regardless of

whether its goals are remotely achievable, simply as evidence of a contemporary vision in

which a state of permanent visibility is inseparable from the non-stop operation of global

economic activity.

�The last item concerns the fate of countless detainees, victims of extra-judicial rendition, and

others imprisoned and tortured in the growing network of American prison camps since

September �001. One of the forms of torture consistently practiced by US authorities

and their foreign surrogates has been the use of sleep deprivation. The case of one

individual detainee has been widely noted, and can stand for the fate of hundreds of

others as well.

Mohammed al Qahtani was tortured according to the specifications of what is now know

as the Pentagon’s ‘First Special Interrogation Plan’ that was authorized by Donald

Rumsfeld. Qahtani was deprived of sleep for a period of over two months, during

which he was subjected to interrogations that lasted twenty hours at a time. He was

confined in tiny cubicles, in which he was unable to lie down, which were lit with

high-intensity lamps and into which loud music was blasted. Paradoxically, within the

Military Intelligence community these prisons are referred to as Dark Sites, but one of

the locations where al Qahtani was incarcerated was in fact code-named Camp Bright

Lights. This is hardly the first time sleep deprivation has been used by Americans,

and it is misleading in some ways to single it out because, for Mohammed al Qahtani

and hundreds of others, sleep deprivation was only one part of a larger program of

beatings, humiliations, prolonged restraint, and simulated drownings. Sleep depriva-

tion as torture can be traced back many centuries, but its systematic use obviously

coincides with the availability of electric lighting and the means for sound amplifica-

tion. First practiced pervasively by Stalin’s police in the 19�0s, sleep deprivation is

usually the start of what the torturers themselves call ‘the conveyor belt’, organized

sequences of brutalities, of ‘useless violence’ that irreparably damages human beings.

It produces psychosis after a relatively short period of time and after several weeks

begins to cause irreversible neurological damage. It leads to an abject state of help-

lessness and compliance, in which the extraction of meaningful information from the

victim is impossible, a state in which one will confess or fabricate anything. Perhaps

it is unnecessary to state that the denial of sleep is the violent dispossession of self

by external force, the calculated shattering of an individual. Of course the United

States has long been involved in the practice of torture, directly and through person-

nel in its client regimes, but what is stunning is its smooth relocation into full public

view and its subsequent insertion into what passes for contemporary ethical debate.

Notable in discussions over the last two years has been the consistent refusal of

many American authorities even to acknowledge that sleep deprivation is torture; for

them it is merely a form of psychological persuasion. I will finally just note the widely

publicized account of the treatment of so-called enemy combatant Jose Padilla: not

just the extraordinary isolation and constraints in which he is held, not just the sleep

deprivation to which he too was subjected in the early phase of his captivity, but rather

the absolute remaking of his sensory and perceptual existence: living in a windowless

cell that is always lit, having to wear eye- and ear-coverings that totally block out light

and sound whenever he is escorted out of his cell, so that he can have no awareness

of night and day, of any stimulus that could provide a clue about the ‘outside world’.

This regime of relentless perceptual management extends to the guards and handlers

who have routine daily contact with him, requiring them to be fully armored, gloved,

and helmeted with one-way Plexiglass visors so that the prisoner is denied any visible

relation to a human face or even an inch of human skin. It is the fabrication of a world

that radically excludes the possibility of care, protection or solace.

7 �

This particular constellation of developments taken from recent events are fragments that

provide a specific vantage point on some of the multiple consequences not only of

corporate-led globalization, including its imperial variants, but also of much longer-es-

tablished processes of Western modernization. I don’t mean to give this grouping any

privileged explanatory significance except as provisional way of characterizing some of

the paradoxes of the expanding, non-stop world of �1st-century capitalism, paradoxes

that are bound up in shifting configurations of sleep and waking, illumination and dark-

ness, of justice and terror. Perhaps it is obvious that what I am staking out is directly

bound up in the new forms of exposure, unprotectedness, and human vulnerability,

and shifts in conceptions of what it is to be human. But rather than address these in

political and juridical terms, for example around themes of sovereignty and bio-power,

I want to explore some ways in which perceptual experience itself is being modified in

this contemporary field of events.

I’ve singled out what some might call hyperbolic examples, but if that is so they are not

disconnected from what have become normative trajectories and conditions elsewhere.

And one of those conditions can be characterized as a broad inscription of human life

into a homogenous global time without down-time, a milieu of continuous functioning,

of countless operations that are effectively ceaseless. It is a time that no longer passes,

beyond clock time. The catch phrase �4/7 is about a static redundancy that disavows

its relation to any measure of lived human duration. It connotes an arbitrary, uninflected

sense of a week, extracted from any sense of sustained or cumulative experience. For

example even to say ‘�4/���’ is simply not the same; it introduces a unwieldy sugges-

tion of a temporality in which something could actually change, something unforeseen

could happen. Of course, as I indicated initially, much of the developed world has been

operating �4/7 for decades now, but it is only recently that the elaboration, the modeling

of one’s entire personal and social identity, is being reorganized to conform to the non-

stop operation of markets, information networks and other dominant systems. The �4/7

environment has the semblance of a social world but it is actually about a non-social

model of machinistic function that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain

its effectiveness. It is a time of indifference, aligned with what is inanimate or inert,

a time against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within

which sleep has no necessity or inevitability. As an advertising exhortation it decrees the

absoluteness of availability and hence the ceaselessness of needs and their incitement,

and perpetual non-fulfillment.

Of course sleep, in its profound uselessness, its intrinsic passivity, with its incalculable lost

time of production, circulation and consumption, will always collide with the demands

of a non-stop �4/7 universe and be a site of crisis. The huge portion of our lives that we

spend asleep remains one of the great human affronts to modern economic life. Of the

seemingly irreducible ‘biological’ necessities of human life, sleep, unlike hunger and

sexual desire, is intrinsically at odds with the diverse processes of global moderniza-

tion. In spite of the military research I cited, it frustrates and confounds any strategies

to exploit or reshape it. The idea of a human need that can’t be financially harnessed

into an engine of profitability remains a monstrous anomaly. Certainly, then, it is no

surprise that sleep is under siege now everywhere, given the immensity of what is at

stake economically.

Modernity has made steady inroads against sleep – the average North American adult now

sleeps approximately six and half hours a night, an erosion from eight hours a genera-

tion ago, and (hard as it is to believe) down from ten hours in the early twentieth century.

[I grew up with the phrase we spend a third of our lives asleep as though it were an

axiom of natural history.] Thus sleeping pills are the primary exception to the otherwise

unprofitable down-time of sleep, though one well-known product hints at wider possibili-

ties: the new drug Ambien was recently discovered to have the side-effect of causing

extravagant somnambulant consumption of food. It is a ubiquitous but unseen reminder

of a pre-modernity that has never been fully overcome. The scandal of sleep, with its re-

lation to solar time, is the embeddedness in our lives of the rhythmic oscillations of light

and darkness, activity and rest, of work and recuperation, that the homogenizing ef-

fects of capitalism have eradicated or neutralized elsewhere. For several hundred years

sleep’s incompatibility with modernity was simply suspended, bracketed, as Descartes,

Hume and so many others consigned it to an effective oblivion, marginalized for its ut-

ter irrelevance to the operation of human reason. But that long-standing disregard is

less and less possible. In many ways sleep can be understood through Charles Taylor’s

account of modernization as the cumulative dismantling of any hierarchical or organic

models in which there is what he calls ‘an ontological status to a structure of differentia-

tion’. That is, following the terms of his argument, the modern world has arrived at a

point where persisting notions of sleep as somehow ‘natural’ are increasingly unaccept-

able. They are, in effect, a lingering survival of a pre-modern order arranged into binary

complementarities, whether of sacred/profane, the workaday world vs. carnival, or sleep

and waking. Of course people will continue to sleep, but it is now as an experience cut

loose from notions of necessity or nature. Instead it will become a managed function,

variable according to existing economic and institutional imperatives, a function that

can only be justified instrumentally.

Sleep is an unreasonable, unacceptable affirmation that there might be limits and thresholds

posed by living beings to the allegedly irresistible forces of modernization. One of the

familiar truisms of contemporary critical thought is that there are no unalterable givens

of nature – not even mortality, according to some. To insist otherwise, to believe that

there are any ‘essential’ features that distinguish living beings from machines is, we are

told, naive and nostalgic. What does it matter, many will insist, if new drugs could allow

someone to work at their job for a hundred hours straight? Couldn’t flexible sleeping

9 10

allow more personal freedom, the ability to customize one’s life further in accordance

with special needs and desires? Wouldn’t less sleep allow more chance for ‘living life to

the fullest’? Some might object that human beings are meant to sleep at night, that our

own bodies are aligned with the daily rotation of our planet, to which the reply would

likely be: pernicious New Age nonsense, or even worse, an ominous yearning for some

kind of Heideggerian connectedness to the earth. And anyway, sleeping is for losers.

In the nineteenth century, following the worst abuses that accompanied industrialization in

Europe, factory owners and managers came to the realization that it would be more

profitable if workers were allowed modest amounts of rest time to enable them to be

more effective and sustainable producers in the long run, as Anson Rabinbach has well

shown in his work on the science of fatigue. But by the last decades of the �0th-century

and into the present, with the collapse of controlled or mitigated forms of capitalism in

the US and Europe, there has ceased to be any internal necessity for rest and recupera-

tion as components of economic growth and profitability. As Teresa Brennan, Susan

George and others have shown, time for human rest and regeneration is now simply too

expensive to be structurally possible within contemporary capitalism. For there is no

longer a single significant sphere or interlude of human existence (with the colossal ex-

ception of sleep) that has not been penetrated and taken over as work time, consump-

tion time, or marketing time. In the connexionist paradigm of contemporary capitalism,

outlined by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, there is the highest premium on activity,

without any clear distinction between personal and even leisure activity and profes-

sional activity. ‘To always be doing something, to move, to change – this is what enjoys

prestige, as against stability, which is often synonymous with inaction.’ And they stress

that this model of activity is not some transformation of an earlier work-ethic paradigm,

but is a profoundly new model of normality, and I would add a model that requires �4/7

temporalities for its realization.

Let me return briefly to the project mentioned at the beginning of my talk: the plan to launch

huge satellite reflectors as mirrors for solar light that would eliminate the darkness of

night-time has something preposterous about it, like a low-tech survival of a merely

mechanical scheme from Jules Verne or early �0th-century science fiction. In fact, the

first experimental launches were essentially failures – on one occasion the reflectors did

not unfold into position properly, and on the other a dense cloud cover over a test city

prevented a convincing demonstration of its capabilities. Nonetheless its ambitions might

seem to fit loosely within a broad set of panoptic practices developed over the last �00

years, specifically the luminous imperatives that were part of Bentham’s original model,

of flooding space with light, of eliminating shadows, as a precondition for effective con-

trol. But other kinds of satellites perform in far more sophisticated ways the operations of

actual surveillance and accumulation of information that descend in general terms from

Foucault’s articulation of the panoptic project. At stake with this particular enterprise is

not the broad possibility of spying and data acquisition enabled by non-optical scanners

and thermal sensors, but rather the continuation of older processes discussed by Wolf-

gang Schivelbusch in his study of 19th-century lighting, in which the broad deployment

of urban street lighting alleviated the various dangers associated with nocturnal darkness

and facilitated the time frame of many economic activities. As Albert Hirschman has

detailed, this twin promise of security and prosperity was from early on a key element in

accounts of how capitalism would improve the fabric of social existence for all.

In more general terms, the functioning of a �4/7 world corresponds to what Gilles Deleuze

called societies of control, in an influential text from 1990. Deleuze outlined how institu-

tional imperatives were beginning to regulate individual and social life in ways that were

continuous and unbounded, that effectively operated �4 hours a day, wherever one

happened to be. In a disciplinary society, forms of coercion and surveillance occurred

within specific sites, the school, the factory, the workplace and the family home, but

during the times and spaces moving between these sites one was relatively unmoni-

tored, during various intervals and in unregulated spaces that constituted the remnants

of everyday life. What Deleuze identified as new was the absence of gaps, of open

spaces and times, on which institutional imperatives did not impinge. Mechanisms of

command and effects of normalization, he saw, penetrated almost everywhere and at

all times, and became fully internalized, and internalized in a more comprehensive,

micrological way than disciplinary imperatives of the 19th- and earlier �0th-century. In

affluent sectors of the globe, what was once consumerism has expanded to a ceaseless

�4/7 activity of techniques of personalization, of individuation, of machinistic interface,

and of mandatory communication. As Zygmunt Bauman has so well described, indi-

vidualization is the work we are all given, and we dutifully comply with the prescription

to refashion ourselves and our intricate identities continually, and may only dimly grasp

that to decline this work is not an option.

A range of recent work develops some of the themes of Deleuze’s model, including Bernard

Stiegler’s characterization of our immediate present as the era of hyper-industrialization,

not of some post-modernity. Its key feature is the increasing absence of any significant

time or space outside of information and communication networks. Their continuous

and ubiquitous effects have led to what Stiegler calls a mass synchronization of con-

sciousness and memory, because of the globalization of media products. He doesn’t

mean we are all consuming exactly the same things [particularization and modeling],

but he suggests that when work becomes permanent consumption, desire becomes

captured and channeled, and there is a massive decrease of singularity, of individual

participation and creativity in the making of the symbols we all exchange and share.

There are related concerns in the work of Paolo Virno, who has described the existence of an

endlessly functioning and expanding sphere of communication, production and circulation

11 1�

of information. Within this, he sees the increasingly personalized consumption of a vast

array of technological products as generating what he calls ‘a publicness without a

public sphere’, an Arendt-like formulation. Virno voices the obligatory acknowledgment

of affirmative and emancipatory possibilities in the mass use of communication informa-

tion, but at the same time emphasizes the reality that there has in fact been no effective

mobilization, no political deployment of all the ways in which this non-stop time is spent,

no insurgent praxis derived from what he calls ‘mass-intellectuality’. The many capabili-

ties generated by urban, technological culture have mostly been complicit in maintain-

ing controlling societies. To amplify that notion of complicity, I will just mention how one

extremely influential individual has recently characterized these same capabilities and

tools. Dr Eric Schmidt is the CEO and chairman of Google, someone with a relatively

unusual background in both academia and Silicon Valley, including an undergraduate

degree from this university. Addressing other high-tech executives a few years ago, he

declared that the �1st-century will be synonymous with the ‘attention economy’ and that

the winners will be those who succeed in maximizing the number of ‘eyeballs’ they can

consistently control. The goal here is the continuous interface, not literally seamless,

but a relatively unbroken engagement with illuminated screens of diverse kinds that

ceaselessly solicit interest or response. Recent research has shown that the number of

people who wake themselves up once or more at night to check their e-mail or phone

messages is growing exponentially. And obviously Eric Schmidt’s model at Google is

the unrelenting collapsing of any separation between the personal and professional,

between entertainment and information, all overridden by a generalized and compulsory

functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably �4/7.

It perhaps goes without saying that a �4/7 world is a disenchanted world, in its eradication

of shadows and obscurity, of alternate temporalities. It is a world identical to itself,

a world with the shallowest of pasts, and thus in principle a world without specters. But

the spectral character of modernity is bound up in the instability and fraudulence of a

bright, homogenous world with no mysteries. The spectral is in some way the intrusion

or disruption of the present by something out of time, the ghosts of what has not been

vanquished by modernity, the non-synchronous survival of past defeats, of unfulfilled

emancipation, of victims who will not be forgotten, and other dislocating experiences

of return and repetition. But part of its effect is to put in question the substance and

identity of the present and its apparent self-sufficiency.

One of the most prescient engagements with the spectral nature of later �0th-century moder-

nity is in Tarkovsky’s 197� film Solaris. It is the story of several scientists on a spacecraft

orbiting an alien planet on a mission to observe possible signs of intelligent life. When

the activity of the planet seems to be inconsistent with scientific logic and theory they

bombard its surface with intense radiation, as a crude attempt to obliterate its unknow-

ability and its obscurity. In Solaris, amid the insomnia of the illuminated and artificial

environment of a space station are the conditions for the persistent appearance or

return of ghosts and hallucinations. One of the scientists quotes Cervantes: ‘Mankind

has lost the ability to sleep.’ This derelict and flattened-out technological world and its

cancellation of lived, diurnal time is an environment in which one’s psychic hold on

the stability of the present collapses and dreaming is relocated into waking life. But

for Tarkovsky it is the very survival and proximity of the spectral, and the living force

of remembrance, that allows one to remain human in an inhuman world, that makes

the condition of sleeplessness bearable. Coming as it did in the early stages of cultural

experiment in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, Solaris shows that to acknowledge and af-

firm, after repeated denials and repressions, these ghostly revenants is the only possible

gateway to the attainability of freedom or happiness.

That a state of permanent illumination, of exposure, becomes a symbol for a profoundly de-

politicized world should go without saying. I say this even accepting much of Jean-Luc

Nancy’s argument that exposure is necessarily a constituent of what an individual is, that

an individual can only be considered in relation to what is outside them. But against this

I will recall how Hannah Arendt repeatedly, over many years, used symbols of light and

visibility in her various accounts of what makes political life possible. For an individual

to have political effectiveness necessitated a balance, a moving back and forth between

the bright visibility of public activity and the protected, shielded sphere of the family or

private life, what she calls ‘the darkness of sheltered existence’; elsewhere she refers to

the ‘twilight which illuminated our private and intimate lives.’ Without that space or time

of privacy, away from ‘the implacable bright light of the constant presence of others on

the public scene,’ there could be no possibility of the nurturing of the singularity of the

self, a self that could make a substantive contribution to exchanges about the ‘common

good’. And for Arendt, the private sphere had to be distinct from the individual pursuit of

material happiness, in which the self is defined through acquisitiveness and what it con-

sumes. In the Human Condition she elaborated these two realms in terms of a balance

between exhaustion and regeneration: the exhaustion resulting from labor or activity in

the world, and the regeneration that regularly occurs within an enclosed domesticity.

But she saw the possibilities of such a balance profoundly threatened by the rise of an

economy in which ‘things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they

have appeared in the world,’ and writing in the midst of the Cold War 19�0s she goes on

to say: ‘If we were truly nothing but members of a consumer society we would no longer

live in a world at all, [but would] simply be driven by a process in whose ever-recurring

cycles things appear and disappear.’

Within the larger issues I have raised thus far, what is crucial is the double and paradoxical

sense of sleep as a model for an optimum state on which power can operate with the least

political resistance, and sleep as a condition that finally cannot be instrumentalized or

controlled externally, that evades or frustrates the demands of global consumer society,

1� 14

and that persists obstinately, as a figure of resistance and even of autonomy. Thus it

hardly needs to be said how the endless clichés in social critique and in art (from Wil-

liam Blake to Guy Debord, from Caligari to the Matrix) depend on a monolithic or fatuous

sense of sleep. But more seriously, it also should be said that no binary conceptualiza-

tion of sleep is either tenable or useful, in spite of the ways in which scientific theory has

contributed to new dualistic models. Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice

Merleau-Ponty and Walter Benjamin are only a few of a large number of �0th-century

thinkers who have meditated on the profound ambiguity of sleep and the impossibility

of positioning it in any binary scheme. It may seem from what I’ve discussed so far that

I’ve been setting up a public-private dichotomy in order to pose sleep as emblematic of

the last remnants of a vanishing private realm. But even if such an argument might be

useful, it would be based on an insistence that the public and private are intrinsically

permeable, always in relations of shifting proximity and contiguity. For the larger thrust

of my argument is that, in the specific context of our own present, sleep can stand for

the durability of what constitutes the social; that sleep might be analogous to other re-

lated thresholds or barriers at which society might defend or protect itself. As the most

private, most enclosed, most vulnerable state common to all, sleep is therefore crucially

dependent on society for it to be sustained. For Hobbes, one of the vivid examples of the

insecurity of the state of nature is the defenselessness of the individual sleeper against

the numerous perils and predators to be feared on a nightly basis. Thus a rudimentary

obligation of the commonwealth is to provide security for the sleeper, both from actual

dangers and, equally importantly, from anxiety about danger. A number of fundamental

assumptions about what holds together a social world come together around the issue

of sleep – in the reciprocity between vulnerability and trust, between exposedness and

care – that is, the dependence on the care of others for the revivifying carelessness of

sleep, a periodic freedom from care that Barthes calls the ‘forgetfulness of evil’. As sleep

becomes increasingly encroached on and dispersed, it may become clearer how the

solicitude that is essential for the sleeper is not qualitatively different from the solicitude

that is drawn to more immediately obvious and acute forms of social suffering.

Jonathan Crary received his Ph.D. from Columbia 19�7 having previously grad-

uated with a B.A. from Columbia College, where he was an art history major.

He also earned a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute where he majored

in film/photography. He has taught full-time at Columbia since 19�9, and has

also been a visiting professor at Princeton and Harvard. He has written widely

on contemporary art and culture for publications and has also written critical

essays for over �� exhibition catalogs. In 19�� he was one of the founders

(and continues to be co-editor) of Zone Books, a press now internationally

noted for its publications in intellectual history, art theory, politics, anthro-

pology and philosophy. Amongst other titles, he is the author of Techniques

of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990)

which has been translated into eight foreign languages. His book Suspen-

sions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture was published

in �000 and was the winner of the �001 Lionel Trilling Book Award. Profes-

sor Crary has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National

Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and has been a member of the Institute

for Advanced Study in Princeton. In �00�, his teaching and mentoring were

recognized with a Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award.

In �00�, Jonathan Crary was invited to give a lecture at MACBA in the context

of the seminar Another visuality. Discourse of display / display of discourse.

This lecture was entitled ‘On the Ends of Sleep: Shadows in the Glare of a

�4/7 World.’

Quaderns portàtils (Portable Notebooks) is a line

of publications available free of charge through

the Internet. In general, the texts proceed from

lectures and seminars that have taken place at

the MACBA, as well as from exhibition catalogues.

This and other issues of the Quaderns portàtils

collection are available on the Museum website.

Quaderns portàtilsISSN: 1���-���9

© of the text Jonathan CraryProofreading by Cathy Douglas

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grap

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pled

Dos

sier

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man

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els

teus

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dern

s po

rtàt

ils

Tres

man

eras

de

encu

ader

nar

tus

Qua

dern

s po

rtàt

ils

Thre

e w

ays

of b

indi

ng y

our

Qua

dern

s po

rtàt

ils

Quaderns portàtils

Enq

uade

rnac

ió ja

pone

sa g

rapa

daE

ncua

dern

ació

n ja

pone

sa g

rapa

daS

tapl

ed J

apan

ese

Bin

ding

Enq

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dern

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n ja

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Jap

anes

e B

indi

ng

ww

w.m

acba

.es

Llen

ceu

aque

st m

anua

l d’in

stru

ccio

ns u

na v

egad

a ut

ilitz

at (

no e

nqua

dern

ar).

Des

echa

r es

te m

anua

l de

inst

rucc

ione

s un

a ve

z ut

iliza

do (

no e

ncua

dern

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Thro

w a

way

this

inst

ruct

ions

man

ual o

nce

used

(do

not

bin

d).